If you have an exact title add ti= (eg. ti=Emergency Medicine)
Research Data Management (RDM) is the practice of managing, organising and preserving all of the information used to produce research, from the initial planning and searching through to post-publication. Navigate through the blue tabs above to learn more. This data comprises of a range of records such as notes, spreadsheets, surveys, emails, published material and grey literature.
Preservation
Data preservation - a series of managed activities that ensure continued access for as long as necessary - is a top priority when planning new research. It is important that you preserve your research data from commencement of your project to allow for long term preservation once the research has been completed.
Funders, institutions and publishers will have strict requirements specifying how data should be preserved long-term. It is important to check these requirements on acceptance of funding.
Values underpinning the preservation of data are:
Short-term preservation of data during research will ensure that the data is safe, accessible and protected against any loss.
To prepare for this, your Data Management Plan (also covered in this toolkit) should include details of and instruction related to:
Long-term preservation involves the data being submitted to an appropriate repository for storage after the research is complete, ensuring both its security, accessibility and findability. See the 'deposit' tab for recommended repositories.
If some data is to be made publicly available then it is important that the data is findable and reusable. It is important that appropriate data description and citation is applied to the data as well as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) to datasets.
Deposit of Research Data
When a research project has been completed an appropriate archive or repository needs to be selected for storage of the research data.
Prior to deposit, data should be prepared. This may involve cleaning the data and ensuring it is in an appropriate format, extending from survey data for example through to documentation and citation information. Some repositories will provide assistance with preparing the data for deposit and other data management tasks.
The choice of repository will depend on the data type and research discipline. The following finding tools will assist with this decision.
Repository Finding Tools
Repositories
The following list provides a selection of significant research data repositories.
Formats for Data Preservation
File formats need to be considered and decided upon before data collection commences. While they are usually dictated by the software you use it is often possible to opt for more than one format, for example .csv or .xls for a spreadsheet.
When settling on file formats for your data is is important to bear in mind that:
Examples of recommended file formats with universal application are:
|
Data types |
Formats |
|
Tabular data |
Comma-separated values (.csv) |
|
Textual data |
Rich Text Format (.rtf) |
|
Image data |
TIFF (.tif) |
|
Video data |
MPEG-4 (.mp4) |
|
Documentation and scripts |
Rich Text Format (.rtf) |
Authoritative guidance:
The following organisations provide guidance on preservation formats and best practice for data storage.
Retention guidance
Documentation
When retaining research data, it is important to document your decisions to assist with re-use. Documentation should cover how you captured data during your research, metadata applied, the software used for storage and analysis and the file formats that were selected.
In addition, it is wise to store a copy of any specific software used to help cover future software changes.
Good retention practice
The following practises will ensure your data is preserved and available to future researchers.
The UK Digital Curation Centre also provides guidance on retention, what to keep and what to delete.
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